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Steps

  1. Go to Settings → Search Behavior.
  2. Select language, out-of-stock product visibility, and image search preferences.
  3. Configure combined listing display, excluded tags, and other options as needed.
  4. Save changes and, if prompted, run a quick sync.

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Out-of-stock product visibility

Control how out-of-stock products or variants appear in search results. Choose one of the following options:
  • Not at all — hides out-of-stock products entirely from search results.
  • At the end — shows out-of-stock products, but demotes them to the bottom of results.
  • Mixed with all other results — shows out-of-stock products alongside in-stock products with no rank penalty.

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Location-based stock check

When you select Not at all or At the end, a location picker appears below the stock display options. This lets you evaluate stock availability at specific Shopify locations rather than using global availability. The example below shows how to open Search Behavior and pick the inventory locations used for search stock checks. Animated example of choosing inventory locations for search behavior By default, the system checks global availability across all locations. If you select one or more locations, the stock check only considers inventory at those locations:
  • With Not at all, products that have zero inventory at every selected location are hidden from results — even if they are technically available at other locations.
  • With At the end, products with no inventory at the selected locations are pushed to the bottom of results.
A product is considered in stock if it has inventory at any one of the selected locations. You do not need to have stock at all selected locations. To configure location-based stock checking:
  1. Go to Settings → Search Behavior.
  2. Under Stock Display, select Not at all or At the end.
  3. Click the location picker that appears below the stock options.
  4. Search for locations by name, city, country, or ID and select the ones you want to check against.
  5. Save your changes.
To revert to global availability, clear all selected locations. The picker shows All locations (default) when no locations are selected.
Only active Shopify locations appear in the picker. If you don’t see a location, verify that it is active in your Shopify admin.

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Combined listings display

If your store uses Shopify combined listings, you can control how parent and child products appear in search results:
  • Only show parent products — returns only the parent listing in results.
  • Only show child products — returns only the child products.
  • Show both (default) — returns both parent and child products.

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Image search configuration

The image embedding configuration controls which product images are used to generate embeddings for visual search. By default, new stores use both the product featured image and variant featured images. You can change this in the image search preferences section of the search behavior settings. Available options:
  • Both (default) — uses the product featured image and all variant featured images for visual search matching.
  • Product featured image — uses only the main product image.
  • Variant featured images — uses only variant-specific images.
  • All — uses every image associated with the product and its variants.
You can also set a minimum image size (width x height in pixels) to exclude small or low-quality images from embedding generation.

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Search excluded tags

You can configure custom product tags that exclude products from the searchable database entirely. Products with any of these tags will not appear in search results. To add custom excluded tags:
  1. In the Search Excluded Tags section, enter a tag name in the input field.
  2. Click Add or press Enter to add the tag to the list.
  3. To remove a tag, click the X button next to it.
  4. Save your changes.
Note: Custom excluded tags are in addition to the default excluded tags (hide, layers-ignore). Tag matching is case-sensitive. Products with newly excluded tags won’t be removed from search until they’re re-indexed via webhook or bulk operation.

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Real-time query expansion (deprecated)

Real-time query expansion is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. New stores should use pre-computed query expansions instead.
The search behavior settings include a Real-Time Query Expansion toggle. When enabled, the search engine generates query expansions on the fly using an LLM for each search request. When disabled, only pre-computed query expansions are used. Pre-computed expansions offer faster response times and more predictable behavior. If your store currently has real-time query expansion enabled, consider switching to pre-computed expansions by turning this setting off. To change this setting:
  1. Go to Settings → Search Behavior.
  2. Find the Real-Time Query Expansion card.
  3. Click Turn off to switch to pre-computed expansions only.
  4. Save your changes.
For more about how query expansion works, see Query Understanding.

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Tip

  • After changes, use Evaluate to test a few searches.